Do NOT trust Patreon, PayPal, Stripe and Slack

Do not trust Patreon, PayPal, Stripe and Slack. Do not become dependent on their services and stay away from them if possible. A few days ago Patreon banned another creator from their platform in what can only rationally be described as censorship. The person in question, Carl Benjamin AKA Sargon of Akkad didn’t even violate any of the terms on their platform; it appears he was the victim of an attack similar to what happened just a few months ago with Alex Jones.

As soon as you share information that’s not in line with what the establishment approves of, they try to deplatform you and take away your income in order to silence you. They either demonetize your content, as YouTube often does, so that your income (hopefully) dries up, or in this case they stop processing your financial transactions entirely.

It appears, as we’ve also seen in the case of Alex Jones, that most of Silicon Valley is controlled by a group with a certain ideological agenda working together behind the scenes. Patreon didn’t even give Benjamin a warning and suddenly took down his account completely. Benjamin then went onto another similar platform called SubscribeStar, but soon after that PayPal and Stripe then stopped working with SubscribeStar refusing to process their payments. Here’s a bit from SubscribeStar’s blog:

Dear friends.

We are here now not to tell you that “we are sorry but they made us to shut our shop down and now we are going to cry ourselves to sleep goodbye”.

Just the opposite – we are fighting back and integrating new unbiased and predictable processors that will allow us to grow with you. This takes time, we estimate anywhere between 2 and 3 weeks from start to finish. This may require us to extensively travel across the globe for the best possible solution.

Stars, you have to know – all your money were successfully rescued from the PayPal and will be paid out to you in a timely manner. We had less luck with Stripe, but it all manageable.

It’s astounding that they don’t even allow you to gracefully close your account and, as we see above in the case of Stripe, get your money from them. Something similar also happened a few days ago on Slack, where accounts were suddenly closed without warning:

A number of Slack users report that they have suddenly lost access to their accounts with no warning in what appears to be an aggressive implementation of U.S. sanctions on Iran.

In some cases, users have reported seeing revoked their access to free, public Slack groups, while access to paid accounts remains. Administrators of the public accounts were not notified of the account terminations affecting their group’s members. Affected users include a University of British Columbia PhD student, a researcher studying at the Technical University of Munich and many other Twitter users who reported personal travel to Iran in recent years.

These companies have absolutely zero respect for their users. You’d have to be fucking stupid to open an account on Stripe and Slack after knowing the above.

When Alex Jones got banned on multiple platforms, he warned that soon they would be coming for more people and that his case was just the beginning. And that’s exactly what we see today. And like I discussed recently in my post “On money, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general”, there’s a very good reason for why they’re going after people’s income:

With the above quick history of money in mind we can have a good understanding about what its purpose has been from the very beginning and what it is still used for today. As Mark Passio described you can think of the flow of money in the global system as the electricity (or energy) that’s flowing inside a circuit. That’s why money is also referred to as currency (from the word “current”). By manipulating the flow of money (or energy) you can decide on which parts of the system you want to power (or support) and which parts you don’t want to power (or support). And as you can imagine, if you’re at the very top of the financial system managing the big currency flows, you can easily manipulate global events by manipulating the flow of money. You can even go so far as to manipulate thought and opinion; after all you can decide what politicians, the media and even academia say by financing only those who support your agenda.

I keep mentioning this, but the only true solution to this problem is moving to decentralized and fully peer-to-peer (P2P) services including for financial transactions. This is why cryptocurrencies will only continue to gain popularity. For example, a few prominent creators on Patreon, such as Sam Harris, have already closed their accounts there because of the censorship and are looking for alternatives. In the case of Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin, they’ve begun to accept donations in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and are looking to set up a new payment processing platform:

Recently, the crowdfunding platform Patreon removed Youtuber Carl Benjamin aka “Sargon of Akkad” due to his political stance on Feminism and identity politics. Following the ban, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Dave Rubin have decided to abandon Patreon and move to other alternatives.

This has led to many content creators in the intellectual dark web explore other options to accept payments from their fans and followers. Dave announced on Twitter that he will start accepting Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) on his website.

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Dave and Mr. Peterson are also working on creating their own platform to accept donations from their fans and followers. In order to make that happen, they must again rely on third parties like banks which is a risk.

Jordan and Dave express their frustration with Patreon in this video, Patreon donations are one of the main sources of income for many influencers like Carl and Dave. The fact that these third-party companies can block people and their entire incomes with a snap of a finger is a scary reality.

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Whether one agrees with the views of the likes of Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, it is not ethical to censor them from platforms and restrict their financial exchanges with their followers. But as long as a centralized company like Patreon controls the platform, it is their right to do so.

Censorship-resistant peer to peer money and a decentralized web is the only solution.

All the more reason and urgency for me to continue working on QuantumGate.

Comments

Love the Christ whipping money-changers pix! And, even if I lose book sales of my indy published books, I will not use PayPal until they repent of their evil behavior! Long live freedom of speech! I will only accept cash and checks and money orders by mail.